A point earned is a dollar saved!

The Life-Changing Magic of Recurring Payments

If Marie Kondo can have The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up, I can have The Life-Changing Magic of Recurring Payments. Wait, what?

We use our credit cards every day for, well, every day purchases. But what about those things that only come around once a month or once and a while? Those things are really helpful to building a larger points balance, getting you closer to your goal.

Recurring payments are a great way to meet the minimum spend on new credit cards (getting you closer to that bonus) and an easy way to mindlessly accrue points.

Let’s use for an example my Amtrak Guest Rewards World card. This card allows me to go home to visit my family a few times a year (Hi Mom!). Generally, it costs about 2,500 Amtrak points for an advanced purchase (read: purchased 3+ months out) one way ticket between New York and Boston. And let’s be totally honest, Amtrak is an awesome (and generally inexpensive) way to get between the two cities. I have all my recurring payments set up on this card, which looks something like:

Recurring Payments

Amount

Cable Bill

~$115

Gym Membership

$50

Charitable Donation

$20

Spotify

$10

WNYC

$5

Without breaking a sweat, I’m earning about 200 points a month in purchases I was going to make anyway, so it makes sense to consolidate them onto one card. And in the first three months, I’ve spent $600 of the $1,000 needed to get the 20,000 bonus points.

While this might not seem like a ton of points per month, it basically nets me half of a free trip home every year! And that, my friends, is the Life-Changing Magic of Recurring Payments.

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About

So here’s the deal. I’m a twenty-something who’s travel ambitions are larger than my wallet sometimes likes to allow, but that’s what happens when you work for a small non-profit in NYC. Because of that, I’ve decided to create this blog to highlight that travel of all kinds–from weekend trips to Philly to a week in Hawai’i–are attainable.